A review of the origins and history of Cultural Marxism, an analysis and critique and beginnings of a response.

1. Communism then and now

2. Why learn about communism?
• The Berlin Wall 1961-1989

3. Why learn about communism?
• Collapse of communism in late 1980s

4. Marxism in the lecture hall - 2009
Introduction to Theory of Literature (ENGL 300)
Professor Paul Fry, Yale University

5. Who was Karl Marx?
• German philosopher
• Left- wing Hegelian
– Thesis-antithesis
• Grandson of Jews
– Anti-Semitism
• Economic injustice
• Social injustice
• Sought to change society
– Overthrow existing order
Leopold Schwarzschild

6. How to change society?
• Analysis of what is wrong
– Class society – rich and poor
– Exploitation
– Alienation
• Cause of the problems
– Division of labour
– Private property
• Solution
– Abolition of private property
– State ownership of economy
– Violent revolution
– Extermination of ruling class

7. What is communism 1?
• Abolition of the third blessing
– “Communism is the abolition of private
property.” Communist Manifesto 1848
– State control and ownership of all property
– No free markets; planned economy
– State/Party control of creative arts
• Cannot become a true owner
• Cannot become Lord of Creation
• Cannot inherit God’s creativity

8. What is communism 2?
• Abolition of the second blessing
– “The workers’ state will come to replace the family.”
– “The obligations of parents to their children will
wither away gradually until finally society assumes
the full responsibility.”
– “Marriage . . . has given way to the free and honest
union of men and women who are lovers and
comrades.” Alexandra Kollontai, 1920
• State takes over law, education, health,
welfare and civil society

9. What is communism 3?
• Abolition of the first blessing
– “Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of
Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific
socialism.” Vladimir Lenin
– “Communism is incompatible with religious faith.”
Nikolai Bukharin
– “In our country, the lie has become not just a moral
category but a pillar of the State.” Alexander Solzenitsyn
• No freedom of speech or religion
• Persecution and suppression of religion
– 1941 500 out of 54 000 churches were still open

10. What is communist ideology?
• Dialectical materialism
– Only matter exists - No God or spirit
– Progress based on dialectical conflict between
thesis and anti-thesis
• Historical materialism
– Productive forces determine society
– Progress through class struggle
– Violent revolution justified
• Revolution will happen in capitalist countries

11. The rise and decline of Communism

12. What was the human cost of
communism?
20-60 million in the Soviet Union
65 million in the People's Republic of China
1 million in Vietnam
2 million in North Korea
2 million in Cambodia
1 million in communist Eastern Europe
150,000 in Latin America
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
Stéphane Courtois (ed) The Black Book of Communism:
Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University, 1999

13. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

15. Communism in Cambodia
• Under the Marxist leader
Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge
tried to create an agrarian
utopia by forcing millions of
people from the cities to
work on communal farms in
the countryside. The brutal
regime, in power from
1975-1979, claimed the
lives of up to two million
people.

16. There are many films
about the evils of
Nazism and fascism
but very few about
the evils of socialism
and communism.
Why?

18. Final years of the Soviet Union
• Gorbachev elected 1985
– Perestroika
– Glasnost
• Gorbachev – Reagan talks 1985-87
• End of Cold War
– Withdrawal from Afghanistan 1989
– End of the Angolan conflict 1989
– Fall of Berlin Wall and revolutions in East
Europe 1989
• End of Soviet Union 1991

19. Reagan and Gorbachev

20. Rev Moon with Mr and Mrs Gorbachev
Meeting at World Media Conference in Moscow in 1990

21. Does communism work?
• Predictions didn’t come true
• Economy stagnates
• Impossibility of planned economy
– Impossibility of calculation
• Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek
– All knowledge is tacit knowledge
• Michael Polanyi
– Knowledge for planning does not exist
• G.L.S. Shackle

22. What happened next?

23. Two routes of subversion
• Environmentalism
– Undermine the free
market
– Restrict ownership of
property
– Destruction of the
Western economic
model through green
policies
– Abolition of third
blessing
• Cultural Marxism
– Identity politics
– Gender politics
– Gay rights
– Gay marriage
– Gender fluidity
– Abolition of marriage and
the family
– Abolition of free speech
– Abolition of religion
– Destruction of education
– Abolition of first blessing

24. Where did this all come from?
Frankfurt school – Critical theory
• 1920-30s
• Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
• Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)
• Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
• Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
• Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970)
• Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993)
• Eric Fromm (1900-1980)
• Jurgen Habermas (1929-)

25. Their origins
• “The initial idea of an independently
founded institute was conceived to
provide for studies on the labour
movement and the origins of anti-
Semitism, which at the time were being
ignored in German intellectual and
academic life.”
• Claudio Corradetti, University of Rome

26. Response to . . .
• Social and economic injustice
• The Jewish question
– Christian churches
• Teaching of contempt
• Accusation Jews rejected and murdered Jesus
• Created environment to make anti-Judaism and the
Holocaust possible
– Racial anti-Semitism
• ‘Jews’ discriminated against even after abandoning
Judaism

27. Theodor Adorno
• Interested in why Nazi soldiers were so
willing to persecute and kill members of
minority groups such as Jews. Could it be
blamed on a personality trait?
• He claimed a particular personality type is
likely to obey authority
• A high level of obedience is a
psychological disorder

28. Origin of the authoritarian personality
Harsh and
punitive
upbringing:
Little love
Much
punishment
Fear of
parents
Hatred of
parents
Excessively
respectful of
authority figures
Hate and anger
displaced onto
others
Based on Sigmund Freud’s idea that the adult personality is
determined by childhood experiences

30. Factors associated with an
authoritarian personality
• Parenthood
• Pride in one’s family
• Christianity
• Traditional gender roles
• Love of country
Critical theory
– Critical and subversive of all the above

31. Its influence
• The academic influence of the “critical” method is far
reaching in terms of educational institutions in which
such tradition is taught and in terms of the problems it
addresses. Some of its core issues involve the critique of
modernity and capitalist society, the definition of social
emancipation and the perceived pathologies of society.
Critical theory provides a specific interpretation of
Marxist philosophy and reinterprets some of its central
economic and political notions such as commodification,
reification, fetishization and critique of mass culture.

32. Student unrest 1968

33. Herbert Marcuse in conversation with Bryan Magee 1977

34. The plan . . .
• To extend the base of the
student movement, “Rudi
Dutschke has proposed the
strategy of the long march
through the institutions:
working against the
established institutions while
working within them.”
Marcuse, Counter-revolution and
Revolt, 1972
• Universities, schools
• Bureaucracies
• Media
• Hollywood

35. Destruction of freedom
• “It is also possible to identify
policies, opinions,
movements which would
promote this chance [of
peace], and those which
would do the opposite.
Suppression of the
regressive ones is a
prerequisite for the
strengthening of the
progressive ones.” Marcuse

36. Traditional liberalism
• If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind
would be no more justified in silencing that one person than
he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing
mankind.
• “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion
is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the
existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still
more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are
deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if
wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the
clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced
by its collision with error.”
– John Stuart Mill ‘On Liberty’

37. In practice
• ”No platform for racists and fascists”
• Safe spaces
• Restrictions on research
• Restrictions on speech
• Restrictions on reading lists
• Forceful imposition of the use of new
gender pronouns - ze

38. Joseph Salerno, vice president of the Mises Institute,
professor of economics at Pace University
What is cultural Marxism?

41. • Cultural Marxists include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and
assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive
policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of
race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services,
social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of
freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on
teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by
their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within
the established universe of discourse and behavior – thereby
precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.
• And to the degree to which freedom of thought involves the
struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such freedom would
also imply intolerance toward scientific research in the interest of
deadly 'deterrents', of abnormal human endurance under inhuman
conditions, etc.
• https://fee.org/articles/why-free-speech-on-campus-is-under-
attack-blame-marcuse/

42. Marxism is the same as Nazism
• There is not much difference between the Nazi politics of
Carl Schmitt and the Marxist politics of Herbert Marcuse.
They both exist within the same Hegelian ideological
bubble, operating as mirror images of each other. One
gives rise to the other in alternating sequences of action
and reaction. Two sides of the same coin. Each wants to
suppress the other, which is why the complaints of alt-
rightists are so disingenuous. They complain about
having their free speech rights violated, but they aspire
to do exactly the same to their own enemies.
• Jeffrey Tucker, Foundation for Economic Education

43. What is the dialectic?
• “Dialectic (διαλεκτική) is a form of reasoning based upon
dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments,
advocating propositions (theses) and counter-
propositions (antitheses). The outcome of such a
dialectic might be the refutation of a relevant
proposition, or of a synthesis, or a combination of the
opposing assertions, or a qualitative improvement of the
dialogue.”
– A.J. Ayer, Dictionary of Philosophy
• Crudely it is about winning an argument, defeating
opponent, contradiction
• Two sides of the argument: either/or

44. The roots of the dialectic
• Limited
• Odd
• One
• Right
• Male
• Resting
• Straight
• Light
• Good
• Square
• Unlimited
• Even
• Many
• Left
• Female
• Moving
• Crooked
• Darkness
• Evil
• Oblong
Pythagoras’ Table of Opposites
A B

45. Implications
• Opposites, not complementary
– In permanent state of conflict
• Good and evil are woven into the fabric of
the universe
– Can’t have good without evil
– Dualism
• Everything in the right (B) column evil by
association.
– Left = sinister in Latin, left handed people
• Diversity bad; unity good

46. Why is this important?
• I do not know of any other man who has
been as influential as Pythagoras was in
the sphere of thought. . . The whole
conception of the eternal world, is derived
from him. Bertrand
Russell

47. Examples from poetry
• Shakespeare, All’s well that ends well
“Good with out evil is like light with out darkness which
in turn is like righteousness without hope.”
• Edmund Spencer wrote:
The earth, the air, the water and the fire
Then began and to range themselves in huge array, and
with the contrary forces conspire,
Each against other by all means they may.
• And John Milton:
Hot, cold, wet and dry, four champions fierce
Strive here for maistery.

48. What are the implications?
“Western thought”, says Derrida, “has always been
structured in terms of dichotomies or polarities:
good vs. evil, being vs. nothingness, presence vs. absence,
truth vs. error, identity vs. difference, mind vs. matter, man
vs. woman, soul vs. body, life vs. death, nature vs. culture,
speech vs. writing. Barbara Johnson
”The whole reductionist enterprise in Western philosophy
may be seen as the conquest of B by a transcendent A.”
Hall and Ames

49. Structuralism and its critique
• Saussurean structuralist theory
– A binary opposition is seen as a fundamental
organizer of human philosophy, culture, and
language
– For Derrida a “violent hierarchy” where “one of
the two terms governs the other.”
– Deconstruction rejects most of the assumptions
of structuralism and more vehemently “binary
opposition” on the grounds that such oppositions
always privilege one term over the other, that is,
signified over the signifier.

50. A typical example
• ”Poststructuralists insist that words and texts have no
fixed or intrinsic meanings, that there is no transparent or
self-evident relationship between them and either ideas
or things, no basic or ultimate correspondence between
language and the world”
• Thus, while language has been used to create binaries
(such as male/female), poststructuralist feminists see
these binaries as artificial constructs created to maintain
the power of dominant groups
– "Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of
Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism," Joan W. Scott

51. The solution?
• Critique is to reverse the binary dichotomy
– Post-colonialism etc.
– Purify the curriculum of “Dead white males”
– Reverse discrimination
– Radical feminism
• Post-structuralism
– Deconstruction - Derrida
• There are no binaries
• Categories are an artificial construct

52. Are these categories arbitrary?
Pythagoras is a description of the fallen world of
patriarchy, conflict, zero-sum game, oppression,
eliminate the ‘other’
Derrida and others stuck in a
Pythagorian/Hegelian/Marxist dialectic
paradigm
Have to avoid not opposing from within the
framewor

53. New paradigm needed
• The Principle of Creation:
• Dual characteristics
– Are positive and negative particle and atoms
merely artificial social constructs?
– Does DNA define sex?
• They are not opposites but
complementary and mutual attractive
• Can’t have one without the other

54. All Beings Masculinity Femininity
Humans Man Woman
Animals Male Female
Plants Stamen Pistil
Molecules
Atoms
Particles
+ –
+ –
+ –
Dual characteristics in creation

55. Relationships
• Give and receive instead of dialectic

56. A new ideology is required
• A new ideology to resolve conflict must
arise out of the democratic world which is
rooted in the Abel-type view of life
• This new truth is the essence of the Abel-
view of life and the core of democracy
• The new truth will conquer the communist
ideology and unify the world EDP, 377

57. What is this ‘new ideology’?
• Philosophy
– God’s existence
– Dual characteristics
– Purpose of creation
– Basis for morality, values
• Has to engage in the conversation people
are having today

58. What is this ‘new ideology’?
• Liberal democracy
– F.A. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty
– Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct
– Karl Popper, The Open Society and its
Enemies
– Institute of Economic Affairs
– Civitas – Institute for the Study of Civil Society
– Heritage Foundation

59. books
• Science and religion
– Jonathan Sacks The Great Partnership
– Faraday Institute
– Denis Alexander Creation or Evolution
– Ian Barbour
– Paul Davies
• Economics
– Public choice school
– Austrian school

60. Good book to read
• The best book to
understand what is
happening today

61. • “The true democrat wishes
to share the great works of
culture with all who are able
to appreciate them; the
egalitarian, recognizing that
genuine excellence is rare,
declares greatness a fraud
and sets about obliterating
distinctions.”